From a
distance, the
Beaubourg, Le Centre Pompidou, looks charged, electrified, like a kid’s lit-up
Christmas toy—swinging, jazzy—an affront—a postmodern deconstruction of visible
pipes and structure plunked into old Paris. Heating and cooling systems,
escalators are all on the outside of the building and painted in Tinkertoy
colors, an exciting disturbance in the heart of the ancient Jewish Quarter of
Paris. As a building it has the gravity-pull of a fun house and is a provocation
to a medieval quarter, a part of the city left intact when, in 1880, Baron
Haussmann swept the city clean of its feudal antiques destroying 60% of Paris
in the process. Most of what we think of as Paris with its wide avenues and
Elysian parks, the monuments to the Republic, the look-alike apartment blocks,
Hausmann made—buildings like soldiers on parade, marshal and ordered with
wrought iron balconies banding at the third and fifth floors. All his order can
give a lift to the spirit, a bit of safe harbor to the chaos of city life, but
the meandering medieval neighborhood of the Beaubourg gives a contrasting
lift—the anarchy of freethinking.
With Haussmann’s sewers and
transportation scheme, open space and streetlights, Paris transformed overnight
into the most livable, sanitary and healthy city in Europe. It was Haussmann
who gave us the Luxembourg Gardens, the Bois de Boulogne, and the promise of
quiet order after the “terror” unleashed in the Revolution 100 years before,
with chaos rippling through France for another sixty years. These days the
Marais, the old quarter where the Pompidou was unloaded, for that’s what it
feels like—a shipment of something unloaded off the back of a truck—is an
attractant of its own, a chaotic charm-island in Haussmann’s dream of
propriety. Trendy boutiques shoulder up next to wood paneled kosher delis—where
you won’t find a buttered ham baguette and for sure, not on Saturday.
The painted pipe and cage
structure doesn’t move well with the other aristocratic monuments of Paris, but
I suppose that is the point. It is a people’s museum. This is no stern marble
box—a columned austerity proclaiming power. With all that color and discord, it
doubles up as a delight as well as a psychoactive intrusion into so much
architectural history, and for the tourist it’s a simple fact, exciting the
will to see something new. At the same time, it feels good to be on the inside
so you don’t have to look at the damned thing, and more disturbing is that it
decays too fast; the rust and chipping paint are very visible as one gets up
close. Ancient masonry mellows and meets the earth as an equal, but all this
techno-tension sits like anti-matter against the old stone of Paris.
On this visit to the Pompidou I am
alone and in a peripatetic drift through the strata of super-modern art works
watching the signifiers for what makes a work of art credible, peel away as I
move from room to room. I like the Euro-slant, on the modernist cannon, the
same cycle of art movement supplanting movement everywhere in the 20th
Century. The modernist juggernaut that rolled through my own art-school
training—the questions posed were not aesthetic, “just make it new, and don’t
just reinvent Cubism.”
I move on into a retrospective of
the American Robert Morris. Morris was famous as a big-time Minimalist in the
60’s using industrial materials to fill museum spaces. A bona fide “Art Star.”
Great swags of inch-thick felt slung across pristine museum walls made an
authoritative manifesto of art stripped of romance. The usual signifiers of
art, of craft, of harmony were gone and those pieces remained as glowering
presences of anti-meaning, the colossus of domination. Big bossy things that
really did hold the space and for me as an art student made me feel puny. His
work brought an archetypal instinct to the front, the giant must be defeated.
He had had a major exhibition at
the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC where I went to art school. Amongst the
neoclassic columns and marble floors he had placed 20 foot 16 inch raw wooden
beams as though giants tossed them—seven or so of the big timbers. As the
Morris exhibit came down the timbers were stored for months in the loading area
of the museum. I worked back there doing odd jobs for the museum and making
clay for the ceramics dept. I asked if I could use the beams for my own work.
Sure, I was told, just pay Leo Castelli $24,000 and they’re yours.
In this retrospective, at the
Pompidou there were those same beams in those same configurations and the felt
drapery on the wall, as well as a room filled with cyclopean fiberglass jugs
gauzy and airy even for the size, suspended floating in the space, filling a
gallery with pure presence. It felt as if there was a Goliath lurking, a dread
feeling creeping up of being dominated. Something about his work was about
battling with giants, some Oedipal wrestling with a stone sky-father waving a
punishing stick. Morris’ most notorious work was a poster for a 1974 show, a
photograph of him shirtless in a Nazi helmet with S&M regalia—a spike collar
and massive greasy chains draped around his shoulders.
Over the years Morris had changed
and the magazine pictures of his work I had seen of late looked like a 180°
turn toward the figurative. They looked downright romantic. The main room at
the Beaubourg was showing large bronze works. They were portals and gateways in
black metal, figures writhing out of the wall itself, toothy skulls and bones,
apocalyptic burnt-out corpses, vivid nuclear hallucinations. They were frozen
dramas, altar-like with dark phantasms, wrenching themselves free, free to face
what? Many were frames for encaustic paintings—smears of red and black, flesh
dragged across lonesome highways. Figures were bound with bronze rope,
assassinations with sweeps of blood-crust wiping out any hope. “OK,” they
challenged, “how do you be a free person with all this looming apocalypse?” Not
much hope, but for the sheer willingness to make these things ripped out of the
dreaded 3 AM nightmare world. That a mind of such minimalist rigor could move
through a signature style and onto work that could have easily come out of the
nineteenth century was evidence enough of the brightness of human spirit.
The
gallery was silent but for the moans coming out of the leviathan plastic jugs.
They had speakers inside or some sound device I hadn’t heard the first
go-round. I was on my way to check out the sound when a cacophony broke the
muffled underwater atmosphere of the museum. The guards, from the tribe of
haughty scolds, were posted about with quick-to-chide finger wags lest anyone
get too close to the art. Woe-betide any who would actually touch. These
wardens of the State’s treasures were thrown into an upheaval. In a sudden
fracas a large group filled the gallery shouting, laughing, calling across the
hushed space. The group not only touched the works but were also rubbing their
hands all over. The guards freaked, shouting, running around, their sanctum
violated, their holy of holies so swiftly and completely invaded. Rushing in
red-faced, the museum director clapped his hands three times, gave a great
shout and it was quiet. He huddled with the guards, in the middle of the
gallery. I listened in and heard that he had given his permission for the blind
students (les Aveugles) to touch the bronzes. The guards went back to their
posts vibrating with inner conflict. The touching continued, the noise rising
up again in happy contact with the art. It was a great contrast for Morris’
dark portentous visions. The blind putting a thumb in the father’s scowling eye.